Lebanon’s civil war profoundly shaped childhood perception through existential absurdity

Evidence

I was young, and the first feelings his image spurred were sadness and pity. I did not yet read the works of Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, or those of the great novelists of the Arab world who wrote about native trials in my native tongue. But as a wartime child, I could feel the force of the nihilism that surrounded my world, the “days of dust” and their irremovable residue that clouds Lebanon, and the weight of the existential absurdity only war could inscribe in me and around me. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1211

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘days of dust’ and existential absurdity imagery echoes the Camus/Sartre framing that the book’s global thesis leans on; ties to the reader’s global-synthesis reading alongside Iftikhar.